Developer Frans Pop, author of debtree, posted an article showing the evolution in size of the GNOME desktop environment in recent Debian releases. The picture he paints isn't particularly pretty: the default GNOME install has increased drastically in size over the years.

That's called "competition" and it's far from swindling. If you don't do what the customer wants and another company does, charges a fortune for it, but the customer believes it's worth it, then it's not swindling. The customer willingly paid for service rendered by them that you did not provide. That's called competition, and it's one of the things that keeps the market going. Next time, if you don't want to get undercut, do what the customer asks.

The important word here is "believes". Belief is not fact. If you induce someone into believing something that is false then I call it a swindle.

Software that takes more RAM/CPU cycles/HD space than required is bad software.